Claude Lévi-Strauss: Anti-Historicism and the Algerian

Andy Blunden. May 2008 An essay to mark Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 100th birthday Anti-Historicism and the Algerian War Introduction The publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind” in early 1962, as France stood on the precipice of civil war, launched a trend of “anti-historicism” in social philosophy. This “anti-historicism” had its roots in Durkheim’s sociology and structural linguistics, and while remaining a positive contribution to scientific technique, the ethical and political implications of this turn were far reaching and mixed. The point of this article is to show how social movements impact on the development of science. In spite of Lévi-Strauss’s self-conscious adoption of the cloak of scientific objectivity, his “anti- historicism” was a direct response to the Algerian struggle for independence and presaged the decentred post-colonial world then emerging from such struggles across the world. The impact of this “anti-historicism” on science and politics shifted over the following decades but such transformations were also responses to social movements, whether or not they were valid scientific paradigms shifts. I will explain what I mean by “anti-historicism” later, once some of the nuances of Lévi-Strauss’s position and its relation to the Algerian independence war have been explored. Lévi-Strauss’s Intellectual Development up to 1962 At school in the 1920s, Lévi-Strauss was involved in moderate socialist politics and at university was general secretary of the Federation of Socialist Students for a time, but his experience of the Second World War and in Brazil led him to a political position of refusing to accept the superiority of his own Western European culture, inclusive of both the dominant capitalist culture and the socialist alternative. He did not ‘drop out’ though, but adopted as his central value Western society’s key achievement, science, and worked assiduously to secure a place in that society as an esteemed scientist. His greatest fear was the prospect of the world being subsumed by a monoculture, and above all he valued cultural diversity, which he credited as both the content and the source of progress. His commitment to cultural diversity and admiration for ‘primitive’ (Lévi-Strauss’s word) cultures pre-existed all of his scientific discoveries as an anthropologist, and indeed motivated his interest in anthropology. But he almost never lent his name and prestige to a cause or spoke out publicly against the destruction of the ‘primitive’ cultures he so admired, almost never. Lévi-Strauss consistently adopted the cloak of scientific objectivity and judged that his political aims could best be furthered by distancing himself behind the walls of the academy. Lévi-Strauss’s trope of discovering his political beliefs to be scientifically proven facts is really a very dogmatic mode of political argument. By his own account, in his youth Lévi-Strauss had three ‘intellectual mistresses’: geology, Freud and Marx. But he was never a Marxist in any recognizable sense; Marx for him was an icon of ethical skepticism and scientific critique, but he never accepted Marx’s commitment to socialism, class struggle nor his historical method. Likewise, geology and psychoanalysis stood for the need to probe below surface impressions to the underlying structures. His public admiration for Marx and Freud did however serve to give him an undeserved reputation for being on the Left. Although he was not interested in Rousseau at first, he later embraced him, and whereas Rousseau had used the ‘state of nature’ as a thought experiment, it was very easy to appropriate this, as many others have, for a belief in an idyllic condition of society pre- existing modern society. Lévi-Strauss’s training in social science was under the aura of Durkheim whose ideas dominated French social science at the time. By virtue of its formal, objectivist character, reliant on ‘social facts’, Durkheim’s sociology is relativistic and non-historical by nature. Durkheim emphasised the non-historical character of his sociology for purposes of territoriality, marking out an academic space against the historians. And Durkheim’s theory was also explicitly ideological inasmuch as it was developed for the purpose of finding a cure to the destruction of social solidarity wrought by capitalism, whilst rejecting the alternative of socialism. Durkheim’s theory was predisposed to minimize conflict and elevated the sociologist into the subject position of a physician charged with curing the ills of society. Likewise, de Saussure’s structural linguistics was developed by contrast with positivistic theories which relied on etymology and phonics, but was never ‘anti-historical’ as such. Lévi-Strauss was introduced to structural linguistics by Roman Jakobson during the war while working at the New School for Social Research in New York. The idea of treating social practices as signs and appropriating the methods of structural linguistics to analyse cultures as linguistic systems presented itself, and there can be little doubt that this would prove to be an extremely fruitful device. Lévi-Strauss’s interests were not in the sociology of modern society, however, but in that of ‘primitive’ society. According to Lévi-Strauss, ‘the characteristic feature of the savage mind is its timelessness’, but not because they never changed. On the contrary, he believed surviving primitive groups to be degenerate forms of antique societies and presented evidence of how groups had revised totemic practices to accommodate demographic change. But because they ‘did not keep a diary’, the origins of their culture was lost in time. Also, his focus of interest was not so much the productive practices which had been the focus of Marxist speculation, for example, but their theories of the universe, religious beliefs and kinship structures, and the claim that these were ‘unmotivated’ in de Saussure’s sense, was plausible here. Lévi-Strauss said in fact that he would defer to Marx in respect to the reproduction of material life. So the ‘etymology’ of ‘primitive’ cultural practices was actually of fairly modest interest, and Lévi-Strauss showed how much could be learnt instead from a structural analysis of primitive ideology, while ignoring: historical development. the production and reproduction of material life, and the content of a totem or taboo(i.e., the animal or practice referred to). The erasure of history was not only possible and evidently useful but obligatory. To attempt to ‘explain would we know little about by means of what we know absolutely nothing about’ is an obviously fruitless, unscientific and ideological procedure. And Lévi-Strauss was absolutely right in this insofar as he is concerned with ‘primitive’ communities whose past is solely a matter of speculation or mythology. So by the end of the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss had developed a clear position on structural anthropology and was engaged in institutionalising the science within the French university system with himself at its head. The Background to French Colonisation of Algeria In October 1954, five months after France’s disastrous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the five ‘historic leaders’ of the various factions fighting for Algeria’s liberation from France came together to form the National Liberation Front (FLN). As a legacy of the Popular Front policies of the Comintern, the French Communist Party (PCF) still supported France’s claim that Algeria was part of France - a reactionary farce of course, as Muslims (the word used at the time for the majority Arab population of Algeria) enjoyed none of the benefits of modernity to which the Europeans were entitled. The PCA, Algerian section of the PCF, however, had opted to support the independence war as early as 1952. In August 1955, an FLN massacre at Philippeville left scores of French colons dead, and marked the beginning of full-scale war. In July 1956, the PCA dissolved its trade union section into the FLN union federation and its members formed fighting groups within the FLN. Vast numbers of French ‘paratroopers’ controlled all the cities and instituted a regime of terror against the civilian population, the like of which has never been seen before or since. Many French intellectuals of this period were Algerians: Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, François Lyotard, for example, were all Algerians, and Europeans were by no means immune from torture or assassination from either side. Algeria was not faraway Vietnam; the French had been trying to subdue Algeria since 1541, and Algerians had been French subjects since 1830 (after the slaughter of about a third of the entire population of the country). Algeria represented the last and closest of France’s colonial possessions, and for any French person, an Algeria which was not French was almost inconceivable. The French working class which formed the social base of the PCF was subject to racism, and the PCF felt under no pressure to follow the lead of its Algerian section and support self-determination for Algeria. However, 1960 marked the breach between the USSR and China which had been brewing ever since Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress in 1956. China was presenting itself as a rival on the left to Soviet leadership on the world scale and Mao Zedong promoted his policy of a revolution lead by the rural peasantry to lay a claim for leadership of the burgeoning national liberation movement toppling former European colonies one by one. (The Mugabe regime is an example of the kind of leadership Chinese patronage promoted.) The more radical elements of Communist Parties everywhere followed the Chinese lead, while Guevara and Castro’s victory in Cuba (1959), Lumumba’s victory in the Congo (1960), and many other such struggles fostered a vision of world revolution growing out of the ‘Third World’. On the other side politically, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution was widely condemned, but the PCF did not yet distance itself from the Soviet Union, while for many young people Stalinism was becoming discredited.

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